Last night, Redstate reported on the internal battle waging between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But while Harris is responsible for many of her own woes, there’s no doubt that the tensions raging within the current administration are heavily exacerbated by the actual condition of the country.
In short, when things are going well, it’s easy to get along. When failures begin to mount, the finger-pointing begins.
But the disagreements emerge when it’s time to assign blame for that reality. Harris’ staffers, in typical fashion, blame Biden for not defending her forcefully enough instead of the fact that she’s an awful politician and incredibly inauthentic. Meanwhile, Biden’s staffers note that Harris is unfocused and shows no competency to handle the problems she’s been given to tackle.
The question, though, is how low can this White House fall? I’ll get to my prognostications on that in a moment, but to set things up, another report dropped this morning that exposes the administration’s current state of mind. They seem to acknowledge that things are bad, but also believe they “can’t get worse.”
Privately, many administration officials and allies contend that the state of affairs cannot get worse, thinking that Biden and the Democrats have hit their floor in negative approval ratings, according to people familiar with their thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations. By next year’s elections, top Democrats say, the national environment will look dramatically different. They project confidence that the coronavirus pandemic will fade, allowing Americans to fully return to their normal lives, and that supply chain bottlenecks and inflation will also ease, allowing the economy to improve.
“Folks need to calm down,” said Anthony Foxx, the former transportation secretary in the Obama administration. “That’s the main thing the Democratic Party needs to do. Stop bloviating over the sky is falling. It’s not falling. Biden has made some extremely tough decisions in his first year in office, and it’s natural that the public will look at those changes in the composite and be somewhat skeptical of them. Hopefully, the longer play is one that will bear out, but this infrastructure package is a major achievement.”
I’ve got some bad news for Biden: Things absolutely can get worse, and they will.
The idea that the national environment will look “dramatically different” by next year is a pipe dream. Yes, perhaps COVID-19 will have receded more (though, seasonality will likely have it spiking again just before the election), but the inflationary woes are going to be long-term, with the economy remaining a top issue for voters.
Further, it’s important to understand the needle that the administration is trying to thread. First-term mid-terms are historically a bloodbath for the party in power regardless of how good or bad things are going. That dynamic is not going away, and the idea that the infrastructure package is going to raise Biden’s approval enough to save his party is laughable. Nothing in that boondoggle is going to be tangible for normal Americans. That’s especially true over the next year, where essentially none of the funded projects will be completed.
If Biden’s only “accomplishment” is the infrastructure bill, flanked by more failures than one can keep track of, a red tsunami is going to sweep across the country. We’ve already seen the preliminary waves crash on the beach via this year’s elections. In order to prevent a total wipeout, Democrats would need to not only defy history but complete perhaps the biggest political comeback in American history.
Given that, in what way has Biden shown any ability to adapt and rebound? He’s a stubborn old man to the extent he even makes his own decisions. Certainly, his handlers have no desire to change course, having fully bought into the far-left agenda. If anything, what we are seeing now is akin to George W. Bush in 2006. That administration thought things couldn’t get worse either, but again, things can always get worse.